1,098 Responses to Wednesday Forum: May 21, 2014

I’ll wait to hear the sentence before I express relief, Philippa. Unless he faces jail time or a substantial fine (or better yet, both), I won’t regard justice as being done. If Moylan only gets a slap on the wrist, it will give a green light to every activist out there. And not just activists- manipulating share prices through hoax announcements could be very lucrative.

I’ll wait to hear the sentence before I express relief, Philippa. Unless he faces jail time or a substantial fine (or better yet, both), I won’t regard justice as being done. If Moylan only gets a slap on the wrist, it will give a green light to every activist out there. And not just activists- manipulating share prices through hoax announcements could be very lucrative.

The so-called left-libertarians want freedom from govt as do the righters

No they don’t. “Left” leaning libertarians and Civil Libertarians are just snobby leftists who have never seen a government program they don’t love, oh except the criminal justice system which they despise and work really, really hard day and night to destroy.

And after uncovering the massive and grotesque support for p@do’s and rapists in the left-libertarian ridden UK National Council for Civil Liberties now we know why.

Judging by other examples relating to commercial fraud, the Director of Public Prosecutions can appeal. In this case involving company directors, the CDPP appealed the sentences and it went to the (NSW) Criminal Court of appeal.

The Criminal Court of Appeal stated:

“Sentencing courts have a responsibility to ensure that the sentence imposed punishes the offender, denounces their criminal conduct and provides sufficient disincentive to others who may be tempted to offend, to ensure that they refrain from criminal activities. Although some statements have been made suggesting that in relation to some offences general deterrence may be controversial, this is not the case with respect to crimes involving the market or other forms of business dealings…

It is of the utmost importance that when sentencing for market-related offences, the courts impose sentences of sufficient severity to ensure, as far as possible, that others who may be tempted to engage in dishonest conduct to the benefit of themselves or a company in which they have an interest, are dissuaded from criminal activity.”

It remains to be seen whether the court lives up to the rhetoric, as despite the strong words, the original “manifestly inadequate” sentences were not increased .

This is the story of so many people in dire straits of this kind: they have never been told, or have never accepted, that things they do now will affect – or indeed limit – their choices in the future.

This is one of the things that the Harry Potter series was purported to stress. That every day we make decisions that lead us down a path of good or bad. As a Baby Boomer, I’m quite optimistic about Gen Y.

No they don’t. “Left” leaning libertarians and Civil Libertarians are just snobby leftists who have never seen a government program they don’t love, oh except the criminal justice system which they despise and work really, really hard day and night to destroy.

And after uncovering the massive and grotesque support for p@do’s and rapists in the left-libertarian ridden UK National Council for Civil Liberties now we know why.

Spot on.

“Left Libertarian” is just a coded message to not let them near children or livestock. A “civil libertarian” is someone with the same proclivities but who also has a law degree.

So am I, PM. Very, very late to maturity, once they settle down they work hard.

Refreshing conversation with my daughter (a young mum). Some of her mates were having a whinge about losing the family benefit due to the new cap…her response – do you guys like being on welfare? A pause for thought, and an instant attitude change. They had never thought of it that way.

Two of my good friends have a long running feud. Many years after that fact Friend A admitted to Friend B that while the latter was looking for his ball in the rough somewhere past the hole Friend B found it in the hole and lobbed it into a bunker.

The friendship has never been the same since. As Calli says witnesses are important or to borrow from Ronald Reagan “trust but verify”.

Congrats, PM! That is a seriously good thing. I’ve only ever seen a hole in one once, when as year 8′s we went to the golf course in Nambucca Heads and one of my class mates aced a par three with a two wood. I’ve never even gone close, though I’ve played a fair bit.

My new house is on a golf links, overlooking the 18th…and a short step to (and stagger from) the 19th.

The evil part of me takes great pleasure in watching the frustration as the poor punters try to negotiate the lake and a wickedly positioned horseshoe bunker to get to the pin. It’s amazing how voices carry over the lake…the air is often turned a most charming shade of blue.

Thankfully I have my wokkas and the Cat to give me the necessary aural immunity. A relaxing game…yeah, sure.

Thanks Token
She didn’t think anyone would recognise her and thought she would get away with abusing the PM twice. Once with Faine and once with Symons.
Faine knew who she was and what she might say but had to have his gotcha moment, irrespective of the fact that several Labor stooges had been recently caught out.
I see someone put her address up on.pickering post,. That is going way to far.

If Chubb feels this way, why on earth hasn’t he resigned?? As former Vice-Chancellor of ANU, he would have an enormous super package and any number of Labor mates who would throw jobs and sinecures his way.

I guess his $460,800 pa Chief Scientist remuneration package has something to do with it.

Bob Ellis, the gift that keeps on giving, summarises the Crimes of Joe. This snippet was from earlier in the week. He’s gotten more hysterical since then.

He made sure sacked waitresses in country towns would be evicted from their lodgings and have to seek food from the Salvation Army, a hive of perverts, or from parents they maybe weren’t on good terms with, and would have to consider, at least consider, whoring to make ends meet, or become, like Schapelle, a drug mule.

The Gastropod holds court every Saturday morning at the Deli Planet at Canberra Fyshwick markets, surrounded by sycophants competing for his attention – all of them dressed self-consciously as ‘academics’ – and with a little wizened wife who’s about one/eighth his size.

surely these people can see that statements like the above are delusional, regarding where the onus must lie.

These people? Flew was the outstanding philosophical atheist of the 20th C. However, once he sat down and actually took the cosmological argument seriously*, he became tentatively a ‘deist’. He had someway to go, in other words, but this was already too much for some who, following an attack of the vapours, denigrated him as having mentally succumb to old age. As for where the ‘onus’ lies, heavens, you guys don’t even understand Occam’s Razor, for pity’s sake.

*On this failure to actually attend to the argument he was/ is not alone. I read this paper, A Curious Blind Spot in the Anglo-American Tradition of Antitheistic Argument, this week which highlights that for much of 20th C, philosophers simply repeated what they believed were refutations of the cosmological argument, which they inherited from Hume through Mill and Russell, that were themselves based on mischaracterizations and misunderstandings of the argument. That sort of happens when you fail to actually read the works that contain the arguments you’re ‘refuting’, indicated by the absence of any direct quotation of those being ‘refuted’.

Tend to agree with the view that New Testament books’ psycho-babble as used as a means of uniting the Empire.

The RC Church were big on psychology in the 80s and claimed that there was no devil (evil resides in the hearts of men?).

egg, how did you get from HRE to RCC? Or from NT to uniting the HRE through ‘psycho-babble’? Or to the claim that RCC claimed there was no devil in the 80s? And all from an unremarkable quote from Voltaire.

“egg, how did you get from HRE to RCC? Or from NT to uniting the HRE through ‘psycho-babble’? Or to the claim that RCC claimed there was no devil in the 80s? And all from an unremarkable quote from Voltaire.”

Since the Nazi rhetoric of demonising the disabled, right down to treating the disabled as “burdens”, “parasites” and effectively “worthless eaters” has given way to actual reason, let’s actually start to consider some actual facts.

It’s been claimed that there are 2,500 applications for the DSP every week, so let’s actually look at some numbers. Translating that to an annual figure, 130,000 people need to be accounted for.

Firtstly, solely deling with alcohol fueled violence, so solely, severe, alcohol related, non-intimate physical trauma, the Thomas Kewlly foundation records that in Australia, there are annuallt 70,000 incidents of alcohol fueled violence in this country. On the severe end, 14,000 of those result in hospitalisations and 3,451 of thoseresult in permanent brain damage. On those numbers alone, it could be consewrvbately taken that in terms of conditions like PTSD and anxiety disorders, the 14,000 would have experienced significant enough trauma that mental illness is likely to result from it in one form or another.

Secondly, there’s sexual assault. Taking the figurs from the 2005 National Crime and Safety Survey (which was the most recent I could find), they estimated that 44,100 people over the age of 18 had been the victims of sexual assault in the previous 12 montha. Working from the presumtion that that rate of sexual assault is still current, that brings the total of those at risk of trauma-based mental illness to 55,100.

Then there’s domestic violence rates. In 2010 for example, there were 92,000 victims of domestic violence in NSW alone which police encountered, according to figures by the Auditor General. Given the psychological scars this leaves, those 92,000 individulals are all at high risk of trauma based mental illness. That bumps out the figure to 147,100 victims of crime who are at high rigsk of developing trauma based mental-illness.

Then there’s child abuse. Between 2011-2012, investigations uncovered 37,781 victims of child abuse – all of whom will have long long scars in one form or another and all of whom are at risk of developing trauma based mental illness from them as adults. Adding those figures into the mix, so far we’re at 184,881 indivuals each year who become at risk of trauma based mental illness alone.

This hasn’t even delved into rates of other traumatic crime not covered by the above or unreported rates of the above crime. Nor has it covered hereditary mental-illness or intellectual disability. It also hasn’t taken into account mental illnesses developed by ex-servicemen (remembering that PTSD was first observed in the millitary).

But let’s shift to worker’s compenstion rates. In 2011-2012, Safe Work Australia recorded that there had been 127,330 serious workers compensation claims in that year alone. This is in a nation where states like NSW have thoroughly gutted Worker’s Compensation Schemes – effectively pushing people onto the DSP because their settlements are no longer sufficient to help rehabilitate them. Adding hat number to the previous numbers, we reach figure of 312,211 people who are highly likely to require government assistance due to disability.

It should also be noted that at this point, I haven’t even covered those with hereditary physical disabilities or deformities. Nor does it cover applications from people who may be reapplying for the DSP.Now working on those figurs alone, which exclude hereditary disability, and victims of trauma where figures aren’t listed, that 312,211 breaks down to a weekly figure of an additional 6,004 individuals per week who may need assistance – more than double the number of actual claims. This in turn isn’t even going into how difficult it is to be approved for a DSP- especially on the grounfds of mental illness.

Now having debunked the rhetoric on numbers alone, it’s worth examining the rhetoric itself- as full of uncomfortable and inconvenient truths as that will be for many people here.

The response of the media and the Abbott Government in the past 2 weeks, has quite simply demonstrated that when it comes to attitudes towards the disabled, we are quite literally a nation of Nazis. Since such a comment will seem like an anathema and hyperbole to many and as many people don’t even know that the disabled were specifically targeted for extermination by the Nazis before the Jews were, a history lesson is needed here.

As people may or may not be aware, it was the disabled who were first specifically targeted for extermination and exterminated by the Nazis. The first genocidal think tank, the Wilhelm Kaiser Institute, was formd in 1927 with the exclusive purpose of deteriming the best method of wiping out the disabled. In 1933, one of Hitler’s first acts, more than a year before the Nuremberg Laws were passed, was to pass “The Law for The Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring”, which resulted in the mandatory sterilisation and forced abortions of the disabled and women pregnant with disabled children. In that time, they also passed laws equatring disability with criminality and closed every possible “loophole” they could find with them – resulting the vast majority of the disabled in Germany being unjustly incarcerated.

Between 1935-1938, Hitler developed the propaganda later used to justify and sanitise the “Final Solution” through propaganda which thoroughly convinced the Nazis that the disabled were a worthless burden- parasites on the system – or “worthless eaters” and through the usage of 2 child murder cases where children were disabled, set the precedent for the butchering of those deemed “undesireable”.

From 1939-1942, the disabled were rounded up and used as guinea pigs in detrmining the best methods possible to wipe out a group deemed “undesirable” through the programs AKTIONT4 and AKTION14. They started with children under the age of 3 (although primary sources claim children up to the age of 5 were among them) – rounding them up in “research hospitals” and slowly torturing them to death through starvation and exposure. The “stubborn ones” got a lethal injection to the heart. They then expanded the program to include adolescents up to the age of 17.

From there they rounded up the rest of the disabled and used them as guinea pigs in determining optimal approaches to extermination. Their initial attempts involved tying 30-40 disabled people together and blowing them up with dynamite- a method soon abandoned after being deemed “too messy”. Soon the mehtod of gas chambers were developed anbd perfected and the disabled were systematically and continuously put through the gas chambers at these “research hospitals”. By the time the first cattle car ful of Jews arrived at the first death camp, more than 1 million disabled people had been either murdered or sterilised against their will.

We say “never again” to the Holocaust as a nation, yet our track record shows that we are no better than the Nazis. Up until 1992 we were still mandatorily sterilising the disabled and even now the practice largely goes on hidden. Furthermore draft legislation was put before the Western Australian Parliament in the past couple of years which would have resulted in the forced sterilisation, psychosurgery, institutionalisation and psychotherapy of minors as young as 12, without parental knowledge or consent.

A report released earlier this year stated that 20-30 disabled people were found to be behind bars because they were deemed unfit to give a plea to a crime they were accused of. Only 54% of us are in employment due to entrenched bigotry which sees us as nothing more than worthless liabilities and a drain on productivity.

Our record on child abuse where the disabled are concerned is equally as shocking. The standard school experience for a disabled child is to be denied the services they need, while being persecued, bullied and abused by the teachers and students alike. Many disabled children, in place of love and compassion from their families, instead are forced to endure a broken childhood filled with abuse as the family attempts to “discipline the disability out of them”. Small wonder that in 2008, a federal government report found that 46% of people with severe disabilities were at high risk of suicide or had committed suicide.

Of course that is only dealing with those disabled children who are “given permission to be” born. The disabled are the only group in society who are subjected to legalised pre-birth screenings for the specific purpose of child murder when they are detected.

Of course such attitudes are hardly surprising. When Adam Goods was sledged as “a gorilla” Australia was rightly outraged, yet the disabled equivalent of that revolting slur, namely “retard/ed” and “spaz/spasdtic” get a free pass in our society – the truth of those terms often being met with laughter.

Of course this ignores things like “the little things” like the blind being allowed on taxis when they have assistence dogs, or the wheelchair bound being allowed to board planes.

Yet all of the above, just as with the Nazis, is driven by the barbaric and revolting belief that having a disability makes you a “worthless burden” and that if we’re murdered, it’s “a kindness”, because “would you want to live if you were like that?”

Things appear to be set to only worsen. It would seem that now that assylum seekers can no longer be used as a bogeyman, we the disabled are the next in line to be targetted.

The Abbott government has made it apparent that they are determined to remove the only major avenues to justice and having a voice for the disabled in the community. Despite it being incredibly difficult to qualify for a Disability Support Pension, even when you are a genuine case (as I discovered firsthand a few years back), the governemnt has decided to demonise the disabled by claiming that those on DSP, despite having leapt through countless hoops, are being demonised as “rorters”. The Murdoch Press has even crossed over to the rhetoric of the Nazis by literally describing the disabled as “a burden” in an editorial in the Daily Telegraph.

In addition and despite the fact that the largest number of discrimination complaints heard by the Australian Human Rights Commission are disability discrimination based, at 37%, we are axing the position of federal Disability Discrimination Comissioner and Ramp Up which uniquely provides a voice for the disabled. Apparently we don’t have $1.7 Million over four years to give the most vulnerable and marginalised in our society a voice, but we do have $4 Million over 4 years to spend on ballet classes.

Disability has already proven to be criminalised in many cases. Hitler’s anti-disability abortion policies are the defacto state policies. Mandatory sterilisation still goes on behind closed doors and there are moves afoot by bureaucrats in some states to make it openly the official line. Now the propaganda sets in where we’re treated like “worthless eaters” – just like under Hitler in the 1930s. What’s next – people like myself being rounded up and forcibly sterilised, along with our wives? Where to after that, cases where the government intervenes and legalises the murder of the disabled as a pretext to rounding us up and massacring us in gas chambers?

Considering what has transpired and what happened the last time such events transpired, such questions are entirely reasonable to ask.

A while back, Tony Abbott was lambasted when he claimed of Julia Gillard that “No, clearly doesn’t mean no”; yet as a nation our track record proves that “never again, clearly doesn’t mean never again”. How many more disabled people such as myself, have to face persecution and bigotry – quite possibly to the point of forced sterilisaation and being massacred – until that actually changes?

Liberty Quotes

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!— Ronald Reagan